Simone Weil quotes

" Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life. " # Imagination # Fiction # Life and Living

" The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through " # Love

" Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. " # Beauty

" Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. " # Evil # Duty # Necessity

" All sins are attempts to fill voids. " # Sin

" Wrongly or rightly you think that I have a right to the name of Christian. I assure you that when in speaking of my childhood and youth I use the words vocation, obedience, spirit of poverty, purity, acceptance, love of one's neighbor, and other expressions of the same kind, I am giving them the exact signification they have for me now. Yet I was brought up by my parents and my brother in a complete agnosticism, and I never made the slightest effort to depart from it; I never had the slightest desire to do so, quite rightly, I think. In spite of that, ever since my birth, so to speak, not one of my faults, not one of my imperfections really had the excuse of ignorance. I shall have to answer for everything on that day when the Lamb shall come in anger. You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India, and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more. The love of these things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church... But it also seems to me that when one speaks to you of unbelievers who are in affliction and accept their affliction as a part of the order of the world, it does not impress you in the same way as if it were a question of Christians and of submission to the will of God. Yet it is the same thing. " # Ignorance # Love # Christians and Christianity

" The future is made of the same stuff as the present. " # The future # Freedom # Power

" In trying to understand her, we must not be distracted ... by considering how far, and at what points we agree or disagree. ... I cannot conceive of anybody's agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them. But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul. " # Agreement # Books - Reading # Friends and Friendship

" To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself. " # Heroes and Heroism

" The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. " # Past